He looked at me softly. "You believed I hurt Amy Giordano, too."
I nodded. "Yes, Keith, I did."
"Do you still think that?"
I looked at him again and saw nothing but a shy, tender boy, reserved and oddly solitary, fighting his own inner battles as we all must, coming to terms with his limits, which we all must do, struggling to free himself from the bonds that seem unnatural, find himself within the incomprehensible tangle of hopes and fears that is the roiling substance of every human being. I saw all of that, and in seeing that, saw that my son was not the killer of a child.
"No, I don't, Keith," I said. Then I pulled the car over and drew him into my arms and felt his body grow soft and pliant in my embrace and my body do the same in his, and in that surrender, we both suddenly released the sweetest imaginable tears.
Then we released each other and wiped those same tears away and laughed at the sheer strangeness of the moment.
"Okay, pizza," I said as I started the car again.
Keith smiled. "Pepperoni and onion," he said.
Nico's wasn't crowded that night, and so Keith and I sat alone on a small bench and waited for our order. He took out a handheld video game and played silently, while I perused the local paper. There was a story about Amy Giordano, but it was short and on page four, relating only that police were still in the process of "eliminating suspects."
I showed the last two words to Keith. "That means you," I said. "You're being eliminated as a suspect."
He smiled and nodded, then went back to his game.
I glanced outside, toward the pizza delivery van that rested beside the curb. A deliveryman waited beside the truck. He was tall and very thin, with dark hair and small slightly bulging eyes. He leaned languidly against the front of the truck, smoking casually, and watching cars pull in and out of the parking lot. Then suddenly he straightened, tossed the cigarette on the ground, hustled into his van, and drove away.
"Pepperoni and onion," someone called from behind the counter.
Keith and I stepped up to get it. I paid for the pizza, handed it to Keith, and the two of us headed for the car. On the way, I glanced down to where the deliveryman had tossed his cigarette. There were several butts floating in a pool of oily water. All of them were Marlboros.
***
I kept that fact to myself until we reached the exit of the parking lot. Then I stopped the car and looked at Keith. "The night you ordered pizza for you and Amy, did you order it from Nico's?"
Keith nodded. "Where else?"
"What did the guy who delivered it look like?"
"Tall," Keith said. "Skinny."
"Did you happen to see the guy who was standing outside the delivery van a few minutes ago?"
"No."
"He was tall and skinny," I said. "Smoked one cigarette after another."
"So?"
"He smokes Marlboros."
Keith's face seemed to age before my eyes, grow dark and knowing, as if the full weight of life, the web of accident and circumstance in which we all are ensnared, had suddenly appeared to him.
"We should call the cops." he said.
I shook my head. "They've probably already checked him out. Besides, we don't even know if its the same guy who came to Amy's house that night."
"But if it is," Keith said. "He might still have her."
"No," I said. "If he took her, she's long dead by now."
Keith was not convinced. "But what if she's not. Shouldn't we at least try?"
"We have nothing to go on," I told him. "Just that a guy who delivers pizzas from Nico's also happens to smoke the kind of cigarette you smoke, along with millions of other people. Besides, like I said before, the police have already questioned him, I'm sure."
I couldn't be certain that Keith accepted my argument, but he said nothing more, and we went the rest of the way home in silence.
Meredith was in the kitchen when we arrived. We set the table together, then sat talking quietly, and during those few minutes I came to believe that for all the terrible disruptions our family had suffered during the past two weeks, we might yet reclaim the normal balance we had once possessed. I wanted to believe that Meredith's anger toward me might dissipate as Keith's resentment had seemed to dissipate, that we might regain our common footing as a family, if for no other reason than that we were all simply too exhausted by events to hold each other at knifepoint any longer. Anger takes energy, I told myself, and unless its devouring fire is steadily and continually stoked, it will cool to embers soon enough. It was for that reason perhaps more than any other that I decided simply to let things go, to say nothing more about Amy Giordano or Warren or Rodenberry, to hold back and wait and hope that after Amy Giordano had finally been found and the shock of Warren's death and the accusing finger I'd so recklessly pointed at Meredith had grown less painful, we might come together again as a family.
After dinner, Keith went to his room. From below, I could hear him pacing about, as if worrying a point, trying to come to a conclusion. Meredith heard him, too, but said nothing about it, and so the source of Keiths anxiety never came up that evening.
We went to bed at just before ten, Merediths back to me like a fortress.
"I love you, Meredith," I told her.
She didn't answer or turn toward me, but I hoped that in the end she would—that in the end we would survive.
She went to sleep a few minutes later, but I remained awake for a long time before finally drifting off.
By morning, Meredith seemed slightly less brittle, which gave me yet more hope. Still, I didn't press the issue, but instead remained quiet and kept my distance.
Keith left for school at his usual time, and a few minutes later I went to work. The day passed like most days, and I reveled in the simple uneventfulness of it. Keith got home at just after four and found a message on the phone, telling him that I'd decided it was time for him to start making deliveries again. He got on his bike, peddled to the shop, and gathered up the deliveries for that afternoon. There were a lot of them, but I had no doubt that he'd still be able to get them done and get back to the shop before I closed for the day.
It was nearly six when I finally closed the shop and headed for my car; at almost that very same moment, Vincent Giordano had locked the front door of his produce market, then picked up his cell phone and called his wife, telling her not to worry—he'd be home before the news.
You see it suddenly, the face. It swims toward you out of the crowd, so utterly clear and distinct and achingly recognizable that it blurs all other faces. It drifts toward you with wide, searching eyes and streaming hair, like a head carried in a crystal stream. She lifts her hand in greeting when she sees you seated in your booth beside the window. Then she moves down the aisle toward you, a face you have not seen in years and remember most from the flyer you taped on the window of your shop, a face that seemed to hang from a jagged fence of big black letters—MISSING.
"Thank you for doing this, Mr. Moore," she says.
"I would do anything for you, Amy."
She is twenty-three, her face a little fuller than before, but with the same flawless skin. You see that she is adorable, your mind returning, after so many years, to the word Warren used, and from which you judged him suspect in crimes both near and distant.
"I'm not sure what I'm looking for," she says.
She draws a dark blue scarf from her head and lets her hair fall free. It is shorter than it was then, with no hint of wave, and you recall how it fell well below her shoulders the last time she was in your shop. You remember the penetration with which she peered at the cameras on display, as if touching the knobs and dials with her inquiring mind.